Today, I will talk about how to segment character from the image by using MATLAB. At this time, I will show about the concept and the result first, next time I will show the code to implement this. In this entry, I will create automate segmentation step by step. 1. Read the grayscale image.

2. Clean the image by using median filter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_filter There are a lot of method to reduce noise from the image but in this picture I found that median filter is the best way to reduce the noise from the image.

3. Now, we can extract foreground image from the background.

4. We will see that there are noise stay in the image so, we have to clean the image again by using median filter.

5. Find the projection in the vertical and horizontal to see the space between each character which we have to use this to separate each character.

Horizontal Histogram

Vertical Histogram

6. We have to match the boundary of each character by concave down and concave up of the histogram. [In horizontal, we have only 1 pair because we have only 1 line of characters.]

7. Finally, we cut the selected zone from the image to display a character.

8. Do these for all characters.

So, we will know the basic steps to segment the characters and the next time I will show and explain about the code to implement it. Hope this will guide you an idea.